Pathfinder Musings: Villainous Options

"Me? I'm just getting a head of the competition."
Villains really love their puns...

Everyone loves a good villain. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but stick with me for a second. Every great adventure usually has a great villain at the end of it, a bad guy who will challenge the PCs, make their day a living hell, before ultimately being foiled by those meddling heroes.

While you can make some pretty awesome and powerful villains with the Pathfinder rules, sometimes you want to give that one particular bad guy a little extra punch, helping him stand above his or her minions. 

The following are a few methods I utilize to make Pathfinder villains a little bit meaner and nastier. They're pretty simple and require very little additional math to use. 

When creating a villain character, add it's Constitution score (Charisma score for undead) to its hit point total and give it one "villain point" for every three PCs its fighting. 

A villain point is similar to a hero point (Advanced Player's Guide pg. 322), but with a few limitations. A villain point can only be spent to reroll a single d20 roll the villain made, receive a luck bonus to a roll (+8 if spent before the roll; +4 if spent after the roll), or gain an additional standard or move action. 

Don't change or modify the character's statistics beyond their hit points or their Challenge Rating. This set of rules is just meant to make the NPC a little bit more difficult to challenge and make that final fight a little interesting, especially since the villain now has points to spend as well.